HIROSHIMA 1965

HIROSHIMA 1965

Kenji Ishiguro visited Hiroshima twenty times between March and August 1965, capturing in his photos street scenes, private moments, everyday oddities, scars from the atomic bomb explosion.

Ishiguro’s photographs, taken twenty years after the bomb had exploded, depict Hiroshima as an active living organism, a city in which life had returned to normal. Yet, undeniably, Ishiguro’s photographs also show a city whose terrible memory was very much alive.

“I had no intention whatsoever to take photographs that demonstrate the misery caused by the atomic bomb […]
The Atomic Bomb Dome was little more than a monument visited by tourists, and the "terror" was quietly sheltered inside the museum in the Peace Memorial Park. Nonetheless, out in the streets there was definitely something, like a shadow of the bomb that was still hanging in the air. To me it seemed to have coalesced, transformed and promoted in the blanks that are hidden under the cover of ordinary daily life.” — from Kenji Ishiguro’s afterword